Ten things Stephen Harper hopes you forget by 2015

Tyranny, the arbitrary exercise of power by a government, usually pads up behind you in stockinged feet. It has to. In a democracy, stealth is the only way it can succeed.

But in Canada these days, it pokes you in the chest with an index finger while shoving you backwards with the other hand. As it turns out, Blaise Pascal might have been right: mankind can get used to anything, including the breathless loss of democratic freedoms when the usurping party masquerades as strong, competent government. Six years in to Harper rule, blue eyes and mascara apparently have everyone taking a few steps backwards.

Bill C-38 is the first thing Stephen Harper hopes you forget in time for the next election. It is passing through parliament like an institutional kidney stone the size of the Ritz. Wags in Ottawa who briefly portrayed it for what it is, the demise of parliament, are already slipping into discount mode. There have been omnibus bills before, they say; all’s fair in love, war and politics, they say; why, it’s just Elizabeth May’s slumber party, that’s all.

Even principled journalistic stands are subject, it seems, to the summary execution of the fifteen minute news wheel. The second coming of Christ would be bumped by Lindsay Lohan running her Porsche into the back of an 18-wheeler. Pity. What we have here is a coup. Bill C-38 upends the primacy of parliament. The government has effectively dealt out every federal MP, including the ones on the government side, from having a say in the radical makeover of Canada. What else can you call it when 74 pieces of legislation are changed without debate or due process? These are the ideas of one man, the ideological love child of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

More disconcerting, what is to stop Dear Leader from returning next year with another “budget implementation bill” that builds on his deconstruction of Canada as we know it? Certainly not Speaker Andrew Scheer. Personally, I think it’s time Scheer took down that portrait of Sir Thomas More that graces the Speaker’s Office. It’s time to hang his real hero, Pierre Poilievre, patron saint of coming when you’re called.

The PM also hopes Canadians will forget 20,000 police on Canadian streets during the obscenely expensive G-8 and G-20 meetings of 2010. In Toronto, the guys in the riot gear would have done Hosni Mubarak proud. The security arrangements included kettling, beatings, unlawful arrests, and other examples of excessive force not normally associated with Canada.

According to the Office of the Independent Police Review (the sort of office Harper has done away with at CSIS) there was no legal justification for arbitrary searches by police and the debacle ended with the largest mass arrests in Canadian history. And now we find out that one of the threats to national security identified by Canadian Forces was “embarrassment to the Government.” Finally, the transformative touch of humor: if embarrassment is the measure of danger to the state, Canada faces no graver national security threat than the ones posed by Peter MacKay, Bev Oda, and Christian Paradis.

Mr. Harper hopes you forget the F-35, an unprecedented fiscal, military, and political fiasco brought to you by a corrupt military procurement system in the U.S. and a rogue DND in this country unchecked by the civilian side. Too many zeros on the cheque is the government’s best defense; that, and the availability of robots like Julian Fantino, who will apparently read anything that is put in his hands. The public money about to be wasted is unimaginably staggering and on that account meaningless – or so the government hopes.

But lying about the program’s costs to the tune of at least $10-billion, as the Harper government has done, is different. It offends the stuff they taught in Sunday School. People get that. Souring the mendacity even further is the brazen illogic of the cover story. How could it be a good idea to start production on a jet fighter before testing it, choose between options before running a competition amongst prototypes that actually fly, and decide to buy it without knowing the cost? Would any of us buy a lawnmower that way? A gas can? Dazzle me with numbers, but don’t ask me to die stupid.

The Harper government would like you to forget that the Liberals in Canada haven’t been the only fiscal drunken sailors of Confederation. Only once in the 20th century did a Conservative government balance the budget – Robert Borden in 1912, thanks to a surplus handed to him by Sir Wilfred Laurier. By the next year, Borden was back into deficit.

So far, the Conservatives have repeated the feat once again in the 21st century, in 2006. This time the surplus was inherited from Paul Martin. Within a year, the government was back at the job of building the largest deficit in our history. Of course, that didn’t stop them from pillorying the other guys as the signature wastrels of the public purse. As they say in Newfoundland, if you get the reputation for being an early riser, you can lie in bed until noon.

It would also be convenient for you to forget that Stephen Harper once promised that he would not change the Old Age Security system to fight the deficit. He did just that.

Former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney made a similar promise in his day. He declared entitlement payments to be a “sacred trust”. How sacred? He promptly announced that pension benefits for seniors would no longer be fully indexed to the cost of living. The chin that walked like a man was skewered by a pensioner whose words shot across the nation back in 1985: “You made promises that you wouldn’t touch anything…you lied to us. I was made to vote for you and then it was goodbye, Charlie Brown.”

Stephen Harper doesn’t want to meet his Solange Denis, but certainly not because he has any idea of backing down the way Mulroney did. He’d rather you just forgot about it.

As he would like you to forget about the Accountability Act, that dress rehearsal for better Tory governance that never went into production. Other politicians give you their word, Stephen Harper gives wording. His gift as a rhetorical trickster has rarely been more in evidence than in the voluminous charade known as the Accountability Act. Duff Conacher, the founder of Democracy Watch, has graded this piece of legislation appropriately – a belly-flop from the high-diving board of political BS. It features a commitment to language and an aversion to acting on the language that conjures up the PM’s greasy undermining of the Atlantic Accord. Best forgotten.

It would also be appreciated by the Harper government if you took a nice long drink from the Lethe on the subject of what used to be called federal/provincial relations. The prime minister has eschewed a meeting with the premiers like a man making a detour around a leper colony. In Mulroney’s day, the view was that consensus was the only way for the country to compete and prosper. That’s what his National Economic Conference and fourteen First Ministers’ gatherings were all about. Stephen Harper’s idea of a meeting of the minds is his mind and a lot of stenographers. Just ask Jim Flaherty’s provincial counterparts on the matter of health transfers.

It would also be nice if you could forget that the Harper government’s first instinct on regulating the Internet was giving police the right to snoop into the private lives of Canadians without warrants. This they called law and order. Government, the hapless Vic Toews assured us, has business in the computers of the nation. And if you didn’t see it that way, you stood with the child pornographers. Yes, exactly the way that you were a subversive radical if you had misgivings about the government’s lust to build pipelines, leaky or otherwise, while paying lip service to environmental issues.

The government would be especially grateful if you could just let slip into oblivion that whole unfortunate incident about the beautification of Tony Clement’s cottage-country riding, that exercise in rural renewal that came at the small price of misleading parliament and misappropriating money – from the Border Patrol Agency to the Conservative Party of Canada. And if you are good enough to forget that slushy little fact, the government would be doubly grateful: that way you might not wonder before marking your ballot the next time how this particular fox could have then been put in charge of all those chickens over at Treasury Board.

Finally, Stephen Harper would really like you to forget that he is a niche prime minister who has consistently served the wealthy and the corporate while “managing” the great unwashed as the problem children of society – the ones who go on strike, who dare to disagree, who expect too much, who cost rather than contribute to the treasury – even if they have spent a life-time doing just that. There is little patience, tolerance, proportional thinking or moral imagination in his government. What there is, spun out of a weird amalgam of Austrian economics and American neo-conservatism, out of personal rebukes and unlikely triumphs, is one man’s unalterable conviction that he, and he alone, knows best.

The metamorphosis of democracy into something else begins with forgetfulness and ends with an eerie silence where once there was a multitude of voices.

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